Monday, August 25, 2008

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #374: August 25, 2008

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Content summary: Reminder of the next FIR Live: Sept 20; PR Week blog contest update; social media focus in latest IABC podcast; Jason Calacanis’ 10 PR tips for CEOs; from Singapore, Michael Netzley discusses India’s internet market; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits - the Christy Blatchford column, how to live the cloud life, Canadian CIOs shun enterprise Web 2.0, to comment or not to comment that is the question; listeners’ comment and FriendFeed FIR round-up; music from Heavenly States; and more.

Listen to FIR now:

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (28.9Mb, 63:09)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for August 25, 2008: A 63-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #374 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at ; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

So, until Thursday August 28…

Friday, August 22, 2008

Christopher Barger at Ragan/eBay conference

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In addition to doing my own session at Ragan Communications‘ “Social Media Revolution” conference—held at eBay headquarters in San Jose and featuring presentations from eBay communicators—I attended a few other sessions, including one from Christopher Barger. Christopher, director of global communications technology at GM (he says it’s a fancy title for “social media manager"), discussed a number of things in his well-received talk. Using my new RCA Small Wonder (which replaces my Flip for a variety of reasons), I captured a few snippets in which Christopher discussed…

• The launch of a community for Saturn owners using Ning.com
• The GMnext initiative with a focus on reaching individuals
• How GM is addressing its current situation, with a look at assigning communicators to become members of auto blog communities

Thursday, August 21, 2008

“Pitch me!” says blogger; “Sorry,” say PR reps

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While an army of bloggers have been complaining about PR pitches, Ewan MacLeod has the opposite problem. MacLeod, who writes SMS Text News and blogs at Mobile Industry Review, likes getting pitched. He even reaches out to PR people representing mobile companies in search of news. Amazingly, he’s more likely than not to be told they don’t have anything for him.

MacLeod is offering to share the agencies on his “er, no news” list with companies. After all, the work of public relations goes well beyond blasting out press releases. As MacLeod puts it, “You shouldn’t be paying them if they can’t broadcast and react.”

What do you mean you’ve got ‘no news’? NOTHING has happened with your clients? Nothing… at all? What you mean is that you haven’t got a press release to issue. But you’ve most certainly got news. Surely? If you don’t, what the hell are you doing in the PR industry? But, well, it seems a large chunk of the PR industry is stuck in broadcast mode. Happy to talk to you if they’re flogging a press release, but highly, highly unable to react to a request for a shout-out.

MacLeod’s estimate of the number of practitioners telling him they’ve got nothing for him? An amazing, depressing 80%.

It’s frankly a stunning notion that professionals in this business can’t manage to find something to say about a client when the media or a blogger comes knocking. As I noted in my commentary about MacLeod’s post in today’s FIR, I remember the Symantec media site years ago, when Craig Settles was working on it. You could always find a list of story ideas for journalists noodling about looking for something to write about. If someone called me about one of my clients, I’d be able to rattle off three or four things they could cover; I’d also offer interviews or sound bites from somebody with the company.

Is this something you’ve encountered? If you’ve told someone you have nothing to share about a client, could you explain what on earth would possess you to do so? We’re not talking about a response to a specific issue here, just a simple, “Anything I can report about your client today?”

What agency would tolerate such a response?

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #373: August 21, 2008

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Content summary: FIR Live postponed until September 20; PR Week blog contest update; Dan York reports on SpeechTEK, Technorati and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits - the SEC’s big IDEA, smarter talk about PR’s future, how a PR firm should provide value to clients about social media, Chicago Tribune’s Twitter army; Heidi Miller on the Knight News Challenge; listeners’ comments discussion; music from Munk; and more.

Listen to FIR now:

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (28.5Mb, 62:16)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for August 21, 2008: A 62-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #373 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

So, until Monday August 25…

My Ragan video interview on the GlennTilton.com website

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Mark Ragan interviewed me last week while I was at the Ragan/eBay social media conference about the Glenn Tilton website. Tilton is the CEO of United Airlines, but the blog—and the domain—belong to the pilot’s union, which is calling for the CEO’s resigation or firing.

The video is featured on Ragan’s home page, but I’ll save you the trip (although Ragan.com pretty much always has content worth reading):

In the interview, I reiterate the importance of companies grabbing domains (and Twitter accounts and FriendFeed rooms) for their most basic names and trademarks. You can’t get them all, but United certainly should have considered the consequences of somebody else getting their hands on GlennTilton.com.

Richard Millington, over on his FeverBee blog, has taken issue with this notion, and to prove his point, he registered the Twitter account NelsonMandela, noting:

You can’t protect your brand name online. If NelsonMandela was registered then I could’ve picked NMandela, Mandela, NelsonM, Nelsieboy etc...If those were all taken on Twitter, I could’ve used Plurk or Jaiku. I could’ve registered NelsonMandela.typepad.com or on wordpress or blogger. I could’ve posted comments as him on any number of political forums.

I would argue that you can have the other names since they’re not the obvious official names that could easily be confused with the real person, company, brand or trademark. But Mandela (or his people) should have registered the NelsonMandela account, on Twitter as well as other social media properties. It’s also incumbent upon business communicators to be aware of new social media channels and grab the names there as quickly as possible.

Millington’s right when he says he could do little to sabotage Mandela’s reputation with fake announcements on Twitter, but why run the risk? And while the United pilots aren’t pretending to speak in Tilton’s name, not only are people visiting the site thinking they’ll find Tilton there only to encounter his most vocal opposition, it has generated scads of unwanted publicity that never would have happened if they had been relegated to registering something like TiltonS.com (on which, let’s face it, the union wouldn’t have wasted its time).

Monday, August 18, 2008

A devious new form of comment spam

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I’m encountering a new breed of comment spam on my blog.

To date, comment spam has fallen into a few basic categories. There’s nonsensical spam (like xyeosi@wocpar.xir). There’s blatant spam (e.g., lists of Viagra sites). There’s spam designed to make you think, with the quickest of glances, that it’s legit (such as, “Great post.")

Now, though, I’m getting spam that shows the spammer has actually read the post; the spam offers varying degrees of legitimate commentary, but includes the link to the same sites that were being promoted in the other forms of spam.

I got one today, for example, to a post I wrote a few months about about a team of Emerson students who competed in an advertising competition. The comment reads, “Thirty-three Emerson students are in Beijing this summer working for the official Olympic News Service. The students are working side-by-side with professional staff to cover Olympic events, to provide background information to the media on athletes and competitions and to create materials for the international press.”

That’s a legitimate comment, directly related to what I wrote. The name of the commenter and his URL, though, point to a pool building company. I also get these with apartment finders and other similar sites.

I’m in a quandry. Do I leave these up because they really do respond to the post? Or do I take them down because they’re blatant spam? Clearly, somebody has devised this approach as a means of defeating Akismet and other filters and getting bloggers to leave the comments untouched. They submit these comments only to older posts. It’s devious, but possibly effective.

Has anybody adopted a policy for dealing with these?

FIR Cut: Launch of Blogs.com

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• Blogging company Six Apart to launch blog about blogs

Download the file here (MP3, 2.0Mb; length 4:16), or sign up for the RSS feed to get this cut segment and all future ones automatically.